As part of the Intiative, as well as training workshops, ICMM have released their, Toolkit - a product developed in 2004 after conducting a comaprative research project across 33 countries and which comprises of modules to measure the ecoomic and social contribution of mining at both national and local levels. It was originally applied in Chile, Peru, Ghana and Tanzania.

The latest version of the ToolKit (2011) simiarly allows companies, governments, development agencies, civil society and other stakeholders in mining countries to asses the industry's full social and economic impant. And now, as well as the four original countries, the Toolkit is also applied to Lao PDR, Brazil and Zambia.

The purpose of the Toolkit is to help the intiative by:

Gathering and analysing economic and social data in an thorough and objective way.

Intiate workshops that work to shape a debate around the impacts of mining.

The ICMM brings together 21 mining and metal companies, along with 33 national and regional mining associations that represent 1200 sites and 1,500 companies in 68 countries. As a result, ICMM-affliated companies are responsible for approximately 50 per cent of the world’s copper and platinum group metals, 40 per cent of the world’s iron ore, nickel, and gold, as well as 25 per cent of the world’s zinc.

The main governance body is the ICMM council. This is made up of the CEOs of all member companies, two elected representatives from the associations and the ICMM president. The council meets twice yearly to decide strategic directions and policy.

The ICMM also has a set of 10 principles outlining its approach to sustainable development and principles that companies should follow ‘on the ground’. The Partnership and the approach taken here is a key method for effectively pursuing the ICMM principles and complying with its sustainable development framework.

Since 2010, ICMM has conducted an annual assessment of member performance against their commitments. Performance is measured against the five elements of sustainability performance addressed in ICMM’s assurance procedure, and the results published online.

Funding source:

In 2009 the ICMM had a total revenue of £6.1 million - this was predominantly funded through company member fees.

Notable information:

This is a potentially important initiative linking resource extraction to sustainable development, given the scale and number of ICMM members.

One of the major findings of this work was that multi-stakeholder initiatives are key to overcoming the so-called ‘resource curse’. It is counter intuitive to think that being rich in natural resources can be a curse, however it has been observed that despite vast natural resources, some countries remain poor. A usual explanation is that resource rich countries often fail to use and distribute the proceeds of natural resource extraction for the benefit of the general population. Instead these revenues accrue to the rich and powerful though poor governance, corruption and mismanagement. This leads to the perverse outcomes of resource rich communities and countries remaining poor.